Mosquitoes, Monasteries and Myanmar: Travel Writing Runners-Up
Here are some of our favourite runners-up from our Travel Writing competition, with tales from across Europe, Asia, Africa and South America.
Peru by Shannon Dymond
I awoke tied in my mosquito net. My head swam – I was still heroically drunk. Listening to the sounds of the Amazon I began piecing the previous night together. Next to 'nausea' the strongest feeling I had was a sense of achievement. I had partied with the locals deep in the Peruvian jungle, and I had partied hard. Slowly the memories began to come back to me. Somewhere between the rum-shots & GoPro'ing, the words ‘Eso Australiana rompe nuestra maldita aseo’ kept repeating in my head. Since my understanding of Spanish was dependent on Google-translate, with less than zero Wi-Fi and more than eight hours drinking, I was totally lost and I needed to pee. It was at this exact moment I remembered what I had done.
Three days earlier we arrived in a slice of paradise; backpacking on Lake Sandoval. It had taken two hours by motorboat, two hours of trekking and another hour of laughing at the word 'motorboat.' Our guide was Nil Tong, a man with the eyes of a hawk, who looked like he had sprung from a Kinder Surprise. Born in Puerto Maldonado, Nil had the passion of the jungle, but also the swagger you have when you own a boat and can name every flavour of piranha. He was the interpreter for a local family who had kindly allowed us to stay on their property. The facilities were basic, but the family were welcoming. This was what a true trip to the Amazon was all about. Surrounded by David Attenborough`s wet dream, I had left the shackles of Western life and was roughing it in the wild. The excitement and kindness all culminated in a celebration with the family, who were so isolated from civilisation that their only modern conveniences were booze and a bathroom. So I drank their booze and I used their toilet. Except when I say 'used,' I mean 'fell face first into and completely destroyed.'
I left quickly that morning, and as I trekked away, my last memory was of the entire village standing around a totally murdered toilet repeating ‘those mysterious Spanish words’ and shaking their heads in utter disbelief.
Ireland by John Dillon
I bombed out of the airport in a cherry red SUV – lipstick on the collar of the surrounding bogland’s slate and khaki tones. The smallest, cheapest hire car would usually do, but I had to drive my 83-year-old dad to hospital and he needed the extra space to keep his broken leg straight. The Europcar attendant, handing me the keys, said his friend used to rent this particularly large model every weekend and pretend it was his own to impress his girlfriend’s parents. It was that kind of car. As for me, I felt like an imposter, and couldn't imagine the car felt much at home either, muzzled by the rural landscape’s oblique roads, the rain and the driver’s awkward reticence. And very wet rain it was too.
My dad looked especially small in such a big car. On our way to the hospital we made small talk and listened to traditional Irish music, the squall of his hearing aid sometimes joining in.
Sitting in a wheelchair under strip lights he looked smaller still, and impossibly old. Context, though, is everything, and in the familiar arms of his local pub post-appointment – having escaped hospital and our ostentatious capsule – he depressurised and reanimated to become something approaching spry. I swear he could have passed for 82.
In all his years my dad’s rarely travelled more than 10 miles from his house, just content to bore an ever deeper, tighter furrow into the small farming locality he knows and loves. This struck me as I boarded the plane back to Britain on the return leg of a journey I’ve taken five or more times last year alone. Perhaps the deepening of a familiar groove provides some of the most rewarding, and surprising, journeys of all?
Derailment in Myanmar, by Annapurna Mellor
"Not a big problem, maybe only... four hours."
This was Myanmar, and 'not a big problem' took four hours to fix. I jumped from my carriage into the high bushes surrounding the tracks, and saw that the wheels had in fact completely disjointed from the rails.
"This is very common, maybe once a week we have the same problem. These railways are very old, your country, they built this line!" the conductor continued in broken English.
The journey from Mandalay to Hsipaw was already a treacherous 10 hours, but I'd heard the viaduct that ran through the spectacular Shan Hills was worth the slog. Now 10 had inevitably become 14, and the trip over the viaduct would most probably be in complete darkness. I slumped back into my seat as a wide eyed child approached me with a bag of chilli mango. Generously he wanted no payment, and I shared the snack with him and his mother, whose face was painted with traditional Thanaka, and whose heart was as big as so many in this hospitable country. The minutes merged into nothing, as we shared conversations about the world and its beauty.
Two hours into the derailing, the conductor entered the carriage with a beaming smile. "Finish, finish!" – his excitement was contagious. The train squealed and began once again to rock through the mountainside. We reached the viaduct at sunset, as the orange glow of the unforgettable Burmese sun glided across the metal arches and into the endless snaking valleys below.
A travel cliché pinged into my head; sometimes the most spectacular things are worth the wait.
Climbing to Heaven by Tom Coote
My feet failed to find a suitable crevice and I fell. My hands burned red as I slid down the rough rope, and the coarse strip of leather wrapped around my waist bit in hard. At the top of the cliff face, at the gateway to the Debre Damo Monastery, an Ethiopian priest sat with his legs jammed up against either side of the rock-hewn entrance; wrapped around his muscular arms was the other end of the leather strap that had kept me from crashing down below. Further up still, in the piercing blue sky above the jagged mountain, vultures circled around the 6th-century stone church.
A tourist who had failed to tip sufficiently received less Christian treatment from his saviour: the priest had vengefully swung the rope from side to side, and by the time this particular pilgrim's feet were back on solid ground, his clothes were as torn as rags and he was covered in blood.
During the busy Orthodox festivals, lines of men clamber up the same rope without the aid of a safety strap (both women and domestic animals are strictly forbidden from entering the monastery). If they fall and die it means they were never destined for heaven. When a climber caught his foot in the bag of the man below and seemed to slip, screaming women below worked themselves up into a frenzy, shouting for him to fall. Another time, one of the leather straps used to lower down holy water tore apart, and the heavy plastic canister landed on the head of one below, killing her stone dead. Nobody seemed very sure if she would go to heaven or not.
Trans-Mongolian by Alice Spicer
It took a Russian sauna near the shore of Lake Baikal, one frigid evening in early spring 2011, for me to realise men held hitherto unrealised romantic possibilities. I was sitting in a thick fug of pine-scented heat and a hastily selected vest and shorts combination, substituted for the swimwear I never thought to pack. A ginger Australian man, a few years older than me and possessive of very little in the way of what I would term stimulating conversation, took off his top.
It was probably delayed fatigue – between Moscow and Irkutsk I had spent three days on the Trans-Siberian doing very little else but sketch, sleep, heat noodles at the samovar and listen to a Nick Cave audiobook. Each morning the train stayed on Moscow time and the sun rose markedly earlier between the blurred birch trees. I was a sole female traveller, accidentally part of a lads' tour of Russia and Mongolia, and I had started whittling my eyeliner pencil with a Swiss army knife in single hotel rooms, with no one to talk to due to gender-separation.
I liked Baikal more than Moscow – even before Russian politics grabbed headlines it was the tangible air of concrete bureaucracy to the capital that got to me. Baikal meanwhile had more ice than I have ever seen before in one place, and two stray dogs – one black, tan and shaggy, the other possessive of an Alsatian build and a gammy leg – that used to join our little pack during our wanderings into town. The hostel was clean and comfortable and the crisp moon shone unhindered through my window on those first few revelatory nights.
The Australian was also travelling solo, which naturally made us kindred spirits. After our train terminated in Beijing and the rest of the group went AWOL he and I shared a reasonably touching and hilariously mistranslated meal at a restaurant near the hotel (again a twin room for a single female traveller, with a magnificent view of the words ‘sex clinic’ in green neon). We shared an awful lot more really – the strange, cold, ochre-coloured Gobi desert, the sunrise sparking the snow on the Mongolian steppes, the awkward intimacy of a tiny four-berth compartment.
I sketched up a possible scenario in which, emboldened by my new ‘freshly bi-curious woman-of-the-world’ status, I knocked on his door and waxed lyrical about his aesthetic charms. But in the end this seemed melodramatic. Something rather fundamental had shifted. Train travel does that to a girl.